Try it Tuesday: Nuzzel

The aim of Try It Tuesday – if it can be as bold as an aim – is to share a tool a week which might be useful to journalists. It might be new, it might be old but forgotten, or it might be somewhere inbetween. It’ll be something I’ve found useful though and one I’d suggest spending 10 minutes getting to know.

2. Nuzzel

Nuzzel was celebrated by futurologist Amy Webb as one of the news tools to watch in 2015. Six months after watching Amy speak, it’s an app which has become part of my daily life.

It comes as an app for Apple devices, but also has a website which works on all mobile devices, but best as desktop use.

What? Nuzzel lets you plug in your social media accounts and then mines the links your friends/people you follow/people you like are sharing, and prioritises them based on the number of times those links have been shared. You can prioritise content from set periods too, eg the last 24 hours.

Why? One of the more famous quotes about journalists is that we don’t consume news the same way as readers do. The concept behind Nuzzel is based on the belief that you are more likely to read content being shared by your social connections than any other source in the future, which seems a fair assumption.

Nuzzel allows you to set up alerts for when a story is shared by a number of people:

which can also arrive by email too:

while the desktop and mobile sites let you see what people in your networks are saying about the links they are sharing:

You can also mooch through the feeds of friends to see what they in particular are sharing. If you believe that having a social network of contacts is important to your job, it seems reasonable that the people in that network will be sharing things which could be relevant to your job.

In a nutshell, it’s about social discovery. And using it, I’ve discovered far more than I was just logging into Facebook and Twitter.